VERY nice that the Snowball has switchable polar patterns! I was thinking that that would make the Samson much more versatile for field work. Good on Blue.
I guess the neat little stand isn't included with the Blue. (I just bought a folding tripod for $15 online, $19 after shipping.)
On the driver front, I can only talk about Windows, but the Samson showed up like clockwork everywhere expected. I used it to record in Sonar, Tracktion, and SoundForge. It was very much plug and go. (It worked fine with the standard Winddows USB audio drivers so I happily didn't have to install the Samson applet. But if you wanted to avail yourself of its bass rolloff or phase reversal, I guess you'd want to install it.)
One thing I was a bit nervious about on the Blue was that it might have a 'characterful, colored' sound... which is nice when it's nice and not when it's not (like when you want a flat recording). (I haven't listened to the example you linked yet... got some killer Ravi Shankar on I don't want to interrupt the flow of.)
The Samson was, well, entirely acceptable for an $80 mic (even without the USB angle), moderately flat and not too colored. The freq. chart included in the manual shows a believable curve that's up 3 or 4 dB around 11 KHz and begins rolling down around 95 Hz until its 6 or 7 dB down at 50 Hz.
From the review you linked, it appears the Blue depends on its pad to accomodate different sound levels. The Samson approach (software controlled analog stage) seems to offer far better flexibility there, important when you consider the Samson is a 16 bit device.
(Oddly, I can't recall ever seeing whether the Snowball is 16 bit or 24 bit.)
Anyhow, I had no problems using the Samson to overdub into existing 24 bit projects in Sonar (and with the proper MDE drivers installed for my notebooks Sigma Tel onboard interface, playback was fine, too, although a trifle less silky than proper 24 bit through my regular MOTU. But emminently usable for location overdubs, something I'm keen on right now.)
And, of course, both the Snowball and the Samson share the inherent limitation of no zero or anywhere-close-to-zero-latency monitoring. You pretty much have to go old skool and partially lift a headphone off one ear if you want to better hear whatever voice, acoustic or amplified instrument you're recording.
What amazes me is that there's not much competition yet for either of these mics.
Now... if someone would just make one with a usable monitor output right on the mic... and maybe a built in reverb for monitoring with verb and... a MIDI interface, yeah, that'd be the ticket...
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I finally caught up with the example from Robert Andrews. I like the song and performance a lot. I did notice a bit of comb-filter type coloration on the guitar and vocal but that could easily have been an EQ decsion, it was pleasant enough sounding.
PS... if you can stand my dicey guitar playing and somewhat offkey vocals (it was late, I was tired, it was the wrong key... what was I thinking) you can get an idea of what the Samson sounds like on this recording:
http://lazybeat.com/ayearofsongs/mme..._Its_Never.m3u [stream]
http://www.archive.org/download/Now_..._Its_Never.mp3 [DL]
I slapped some compression on it, if I recall correctly, but I didn't use any EQ or FX.